Oracle Blog

News from the GlassFish Community

Wednesday Jun 12, 2013

JavaEE 7 has been officially released and the Java Spotlight Podcast
has been supporting this major release by featuring almost every API
change, both major and minor, for the last 11 months. There are fifteen
Java Spotlight Podcast feature interviews with the JCP specification
leads from Oracle, Red Hat, and IBM in a relaxed question and answer
format.

Monday May 13, 2013

Please join me in congratulating the 2012 JCP star specification leads Pete Muir of Red Hat (lead for CDI 1.1), Santiago Pericas-Geertsen of Oracle (co lead for JAX-RS 2) and Marek Potociar of Oracle (co lead for JAX-RS 2).
Leading a non-trivial group of often opinionated, very intelligent people to achieve meaningful consensus codified into a long-lasting standard is an enormously hard task. Doing that successfully and gracefully takes a special kind of individual. The star specification lead program is a very open way of giving some measure of recognition to such efforts.

You can find out a bit more about the program and this year's winners on the JCP site.

Friday Mar 08, 2013

Grassroots level community participation is key to the success of any open standard - Java EE is certainly no exception. Realizing this fact, Oracle (and Sun before it) has done quite a bit to improve transparency through the ongoing process of JCP reform. The improvements are pretty clear to those of us working with the JCP for a number of years, especially as independents. The changes are not necessarily obvious to folks new or unfamiliar with the JCP however. In fact, many still seem to hold some pretty dubious views on the JCP.

My colleague Arun Gupta recently wrote a very insightful blog on this topic titled Transparency and Community Participation in Java EE 7. It's definitely a worthwhile read and a great place to start if you are curious about the JCP or are interested in participating yourself. In the blog entry, Arun discusses some of the crucial changes in JCP 2.8, how Java EE 7 JSRs have met and exceeded the transparency requirements, including some hard data on improved community participation as well as the outstanding continued success of initiatives like Adopt-a-JSR via JUGs worldwide.

Friday Feb 22, 2013

The schema namespace for Java EE 7 APIs are moving from java.sun.com to now perhaps a more fitting xmlns.jcp.org. You are encouraged to take a look at the latest Java EE 7 draft schemas at:
http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/index.html (it is still a work in progress since as you know, Java EE 7 has not been finalized yet). Some of the updated schemas include:

application_7.xsd

application-client_7.xsd

connector_1_7.xsd

ejb-jar_3_2.xsd

javaee_7.xsd

jsp_2_3.xsd

javaee_web_services_1_4.xsd

javaee_web_services_client_1_4.xsd

web-app_3_1.xsd

web-common_3_1.xsd

web-fragment_3_1.xsd

web-facelettaglibrary_2_2.xsd

web-facesconfig_2_2.xsd

Independent consultant, ardent Java EE advocate and long-time JCP expert Antonio Goncalves had this to say about the change - "technically changing a namespace is not difficult, so this is not a major Java EE 7 technical update. But it's a symbol. For many years we were wondering what would happen to java.sun.com namespaces. Most of us thought it would be renamed to java.oracle.com. But no, it went back to where it originally belonged, to the JCP. Lately the JCP has moved towards greater transparency (i.e. JCP.next) and having the JCP namespaces strenghens this move."

Note, not all API namespaces will be updated right away since some APIs are not changing in Java EE 7. For example, JAX-WS will likely not be updated. All the older namespaces will continue to be maintained for backwards compatibility.

Friday Feb 08, 2013

As you might be aware, the Adopt-a-JSR program was started by the London Java Community and SouJava to encourage more grassroots level participation in the JCP. The idea is for developers to closely engage with a JSR they are interested in through their own JUG. On January 18th there was a pretty sucessful initial online call explaining the details of the program. There were over 40 JUG leaders/members on the call from around the world.

The folks behind the Adopt-a-JSR program are now hosting a follow-up online meetup on February 27th. Anyone can join the meetup to learn about the current JUG Adopt-a-JSR use cases, new developments and provide feedback. Martijn Verberg from the LJC, Bruno Souza from SouJava, Arun Gupta from the Java EE/GlassFish team and Heather VanCura from the JCP program office will be leading the meetup.

If you happen to miss it, no worries - recordings of the meetup and associated materials will be posted on the JCP multimedia page again (check out the slide deck and recording from the January 18th meetup).

Tuesday Jan 29, 2013

As you may be aware, the Adopt-a-JSR online meeting was held on January 18. The meeting was led by Bruno Souza from SouJava, Martijn Verberg from the London Java Community, Arun Gupta from the GlassFish/Java EE team and Heather VanCura from the JCP. Heather opened the call with an overview & introductions, Martijn and Bruno shared the program details and encouraged JUG members to get more involved in adopting JSRs and Arun provided an update on the Java EE 7 JSRs being adopted, along with some very exciting use cases from JUG Chennai and BeJUG.

The meeting was a success with 40 Java User Group participants from all over the world. There will be a follow up meeting scheduled at the end of February, so stay tuned.

Thursday Jan 24, 2013

Congratulations to the Java Batch spec lead Chris Vignola of IBM and the Java Batch EG! Java Batch (more specifically "Batch Applications for the Java Platform" or JSR 352) was the very first Java EE 7 JSR to reach the Proposed Final Draft stage. We expect more Java EE 7 JSRs to follow suit shortly.

The draft is available for download on the JCP page for Java Batch. We encourage you to read the draft and provide your feedback (this is one of the last chances you will have to do so before the spec is finalized).

Monday Jan 14, 2013

Java EE 7 has turned the last lap and is racing towards the finish line! The Java EE 7 JSR itself (JSR 342) very recently published it's official Public Review Draft. The review closes on February 11th so act fast, read the draft spec and send your feedback. The draft is available here. After the review is over, the JSR will go to the EC ballot.

And Java EE 7 is not the only one. As this JSR update from the JCP indicates, the review periods for JMS 2, Java EE Concurrency, WebSocket, JPA 2.1 and JSON-P are still open but will be coming to an end rapidly in the next few weeks.

Wednesday Dec 12, 2012

Broad community participation is key to the success of any technology worth it's salt. The Adopt-a-JSR program was launched in recognition of this fact. It is an initiative by some key JUG leaders around the World to encourage JUG members to get involved in a JSR and to evangelize that JSR to their JUG and the wider Java community, in order to increase grass roots participation. There are a number of JUGs that have already jumped in like the Chennai JUG, SouJava, London Java Community, BeJUG, GoJava, Morrocco JUG, Campinas JUG and ItpJava. Note that any developer can participate, there isn't a need to be a JUG leader.

There are a number of Java EE 7 JSRs that could use your help right now including WebSocket, JSON, Caching, Concurrency for EE, JAX-RS2 and JMS2. Find out more here.

Honor WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/beans.xml to activate WEB-INF/classes in a bean archive

Global ordering and enablement of interceptors and decorators

Global selection of alternatives

@New deprecated

Clarify interceptors and decorators must be implemented using proxying

Allow multiple annotated types per Java class

Allow Extensions to specify the annotations that they are interested in

The CDI 1.1 expert group has a number of open issues that they would like immediate feedback on. These include critical issues like bean visibility, startup events and restricting CDI scans. Read the details here and let your voice be heard!

The JSR 348 is already completed and JSR 355 is scheduled to be complete later this year. JSR 358 was recently filed and plans to revise several items such as modify the JSPA, Process Document, and a large number of complex issues. Because of the nature and scope of work, the Expert Group consists of representatives from all companies in the Executive Committee.

Tuesday Apr 17, 2012

Java API for WebSocket (aka JSR 356) will define a standard API for creating WebSocket applications. The Expert Group consists of RedHat, Google, Caucho, VMWare and other individuals like JeanFrancois Arcand and Justin Lee.

GlassFish has support for WebSocket using Grizzly on server and client for some time. The JSR will provide standards-based code to write WebSocket applications.

Danny Coward has started websocket-spec and you can read the EG discussions at jsr356-experts. The users@websocket-spec allows you to participate in the discussion. Of course, all this will be delivered as part of Java EE 7 which is now scheduled for Q2 2013.

How are you using WebSocket ? Would you like to join the EG and contribute ?

Wednesday Apr 11, 2012

JSR 166 added support for concurrency utilities in the Java platform. The JSR 236's, a.k.a Concurrency Utilities for Java EE, goal was to extend that support to the Java EE platform by adding asynchronous abilities to different application components. The EG was however stagnant since Dec 2003.

Its coming back to life with the co-spec lead Anthony Lai's message to the
JSR 236 EG (archived here).

The JSR will be operating under JCP 2.8's transparency rules and can be tracked at concurrency-spec.java.net. All the mailing lists are archived here. The final release is expected in Q1 2013 and the APIs will live in the javax.enterprise.concurrent package.

Tuesday Mar 20, 2012

JSR 357 (Social Media API) has not passed the initial ballot which means, according to the JCP rules, that "the JSR submitter(s) who may revise the JSR and resubmit it within 14 days".

Given the comments associated with the negative votes, it may be challenging for the submitters to address the concerns about the scope assessed by many as being too wide.

Standardization is a difficult task and the JCP (the Executive Committee in fact) played its role by pointing out the challenges ahead of such a JSR as it was envisioned by its submitters, and thus the risk of never completing. If anything this proves that the JCP is working as expected.

For those disappointed that Java will not get a standard "Social Media API" (for now at least), let me remind you of the recent open-sourcing of DaliCore.

With JSR 339's Early Draft Review 2 currently out, another draft review is planned for April, the public review should be available in June while the final draft is currently scheduled for the end of the summer. In short, expect completion sometime before the end of 2012.